"I had an office at Orion at the time, and I brought them Spider-Man," he explained. " I said, 'Look, in a couple of years, I'll be too old to play Peter Parker'. And they said, 'Yeah, we're just thinking that cartoons are not the future, comic books are not the future'.

"I said, 'But it's Spider-Man, I'm perfect'. And they were like, 'Nah, we're gonna wait'. I had a guy in my pocket who was going to get them for me. They didn't know s**t."

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man was released some years later with Tobey Maguire in the lead role. Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man recently rebooted the movie series.